Evaluating Container Networking in Secure Cloud Environments

Ricardo Urbaez

Co-Presenters: Individual Presentation

College: Hennings College of Science Mathematics and Technology

Major: BS.COMPUTER/SCI

Faculty Research Mentor: Lei, Jiaxin  

Abstract:

Containers are a lightweight virtualization technology that enables efficient application deployment and high resource utilization in modern cloud computing environments. Compared to traditional virtual machines, containers introduce lower overhead and support higher levels of consolidation. A critical component of container-based systems is the networking layer, which enables communication among containers on the same host and across distributed machines. In practice, many container networking solutions are built on overlay networks to provide flexible connectivity and logical isolation between applications and tenants.In this project, we conduct a comprehensive experimental study of representative container networking solutions in a realistic cloud environment. We compare different container network configurations in terms of throughput and latency under a variety of workloads and network settings. From a practical and cybersecurity perspective, our results demonstrate important tradeoffs between performance, flexibility, and isolation in container networking. While overlay networks improve deployment flexibility and support logical separation between applications, they can introduce non-trivial overhead that impacts application responsiveness and system efficiency. This study provides empirical insights to help practitioners and system designers better understand the performance implications of different container networking choices and make informed decisions when building secure and high-performance cloud systems.